I met Little Richard in what I believe was his only appearance in Spain: in 2005 he performed as the headliner at Crossroad, a very rock festival held in the surroundings of Gijón.
There she upset the organizers: she asked that a hermitage be opened for her, so that she could pray in solitude.
Impossible, they replied.
They did accept another of his demands: that a car take him from his dressing room to the stage, about 300 meters away.
It might seem like an example of deceitfulness, but it made sense: in the middle of the night, through rough terrain, the route posed a risk for someone with mobility problems (years later, he would end up tied to a wheelchair).
And he delivered: he offered a good concert, nothing like the apathy that a contemporary of his, Chuck Berry, had accustomed us to.
Little Richard has been released in Spanish cinemas
.
I am Everything
, a vibrant documentary loaded with thesis.
The first, that Little Richard was the inventor of
rock & roll
, although he preferred to describe himself as “the architect.”
In reality, what we call
rock & roll
encompassed half a dozen very different torrents, which converged into a tumultuous river sold by the media and the music industry, in the mid-fifties, as a trend exclusively for “youth.”
Without denying, of course, that the trend led by Little Richard was particularly frenetic and intoxicating.
So explosive, in howls and punishment at the piano, that he dragged the relaxed New Orleans instrumentalists, in his premiere for the Specialty label, with his insurgent cry: “Auanbabulubabalambambú”.
The second proposition is less controversial: Little Richard was vampirized by white artists, especially a dapper vocalist named Pat Boone.
Which was not necessarily negative: the versions made by the Beatles would facilitate Little Richard's commercial rebirth after his barren years as a religious singer.
It can be said that this appropriation has characterized the entire history of pop.
Right now,
urban
dominates and many of its practitioners are unaware that the word, beyond its geographical meaning, is a euphemism in American
marketing
to refer to consumers in African-American neighborhoods and, consequently, to their musical expressions.
Lisa Cortés' documentary,
Little Richard.
I am Everything
, launches a third proposal: that he was the pioneer of
queer
.
This was evident in the countries where he performed... and not so much in the rest of the world, since he seemed to be singing a series of flamboyant women, from
Good Golly Miss Molly
to
Long Tall Sally
.
In his homeland, the nickname “
the Georgia peach
” was a nod to his sexual preferences.
Little Richard complicated it by oscillating between boasting and denying his gay nature, for which he found no support in the pages of the Bible.
That a
crazy woman
became a preacher seemed very exotic to us.
We were unaware, of course, of the central role of the churches in the cohesion of the black minority, which showed a high degree of tolerance towards its pastors and evangelists, even if they were personalities as excessive as Little Richard.
The drama, as the documentary emphasizes, is that, in historical terms, he was a great emancipator.
But he did not know how to emancipate himself.
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